If you’ve tried to maintain a streak or set an intention to do any new habit daily and failed you’ve experienced the habitual feeling of defeat when having the best of intentions just isn’t enough. Setting a goal to meditate every day, or go outside and walk every day, is understandably good for your mental health, especially in the postpartum phase of life, but the nagging feeling of having to start over every time you miss a day isn’t helping anyone.
Enter Elastic Habits
Elastic Habits: How to Create Smarter Habits That Adapt to your Day by Stephen Guise helped me see that different levels of goal / habit achievement can exist and they do not need to be repeated every single day. Guise states that habits can be categorized into three different achievement levels; mini, plus, or elite, bringing a flexibility to other rigid and binary ways of marking down achievements in a habit tracker.
The mini, plus, and elite levels allow you to set a monthly goal that is adaptable to the day you are facing. For example, if your goal is to exercise three days a week your elastic habit could be to do a workout class on YouTube or Peloton where a 5-minute class is your mini goal, 20 minutes for plus, and 30 minutes is elite. The same principle applies to tracking another type of goal.
When it comes to the curveballs of working parent life there are the frequent “monkey wrenches” as I call them that derail your plans for tomorrow.
· A child needs to stay home sick
· Closed childcare due to bad weather
· You have a crazy night of teething, separation anxiety, bad naps during the day, and bam you are up all night and trying to get through the next day on six hours or less of broken sleep.
When these days happen, you can fall back on the feeling of accomplishment by completing a mini goal. YouTodoYou has a YouTube video reviewing Elastic Habits and she so kindly put together a free Google Sheets version of the Elastic Habits tracker you can copy and make your own.
The scoring on the left can be motivational at times. When I see that I’m just one more day away from a bonus on my movement habit it gives me the nudge to try a little harder. The trick is to have a monthly reward in place that matters and motivates you. It could be something small and immediate like a pedicure if you hit 150 points this month.
By establishing monthly goals of different difficulty levels, like varying workout lengths, you can continue making advancements even during stressful months. Embrace Elastic Habits to cultivate more adaptable habits that can withstand life's uncertainties, while staying motivated through realistic goals and incentives.
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